You might be my father
One evening last fall, after his three young children went to bed, Joseph Arriaga sat at his laptop and sent a Facebook message to a stranger.
“Hello Robert. My name is Joseph,” it began. “I was born in 1992.”
So many of Arriaga’s defining memories had built toward this message. There was the time, around third grade, when a cousin blurted that Arriaga wasn’t truly part of their family. The strained follow-up conversations with his mother. His recent gamble in mailing a sample of saliva to Ancestry. com.
In launching his search, Arriaga, 29, was trying to sort out truth from family folklore, attempting to verify or disprove a story about his paternity — a story that had filled him with anger and shame for years. Would a DNA match lead him to a dead man or a felon, or perhaps to a friendly face whose features he’d recognize as his own? Or would he find anyone at all?
But now, in the evening stillness of his Riverside, California, home, Arriaga stared down at a man’s profile picture on Facebook and worried that the message he was about to send would blow up his life.
“I’ve done a great deal of research,” he wrote, “and I think you might be my biological father.”
Arriaga’s high-stakes quest offered the potential to enrich or devastate — and certainly alter — the lives of several people involved.
There was a key narrative Arriaga needed to sort out — his own — so with encouragement and investigative help from his wife, he launched the monthslong process that would shift the dynamics of two families and ultimately free him from a heaviness that had shaped his life.
It was 10:44 p.m. in Gainesville, Florida, and Robert “Bobby” Parker, 52, had just set down his book for the night. His wife was already asleep and he decided to make one final scroll through Facebook. He read the message from Joseph Arriaga. It gave him chills.
“Good morning!” Parker wrote back. “Do you go by Joseph, Joe, or Joey? You were Joey as a baby.”
Back in California, Arriaga’s wife saw he’d received a Facebook message and shook him out of bed.
“He knows about you!” she told him.
Stunned, Arriaga read the message, quickly responding to several of Parker’s questions. Where do you live? (My wife and I live in Southern California, Arriaga answered.) Is that your little girl in your picture? (That is my daughter! She’s 5 now, and has a 3-year-old brother and 1-year-old sister.)
Then, he sent another, shorter message:
“This was a lot to wake up to. You knew about me? Enough to know I went by Joey?”
In conversations over email, phone calls and two visits since then, Bobby and Joey, as they call one another, began to build a relationship.
Bit by bit, they told each other about their lives.
Parker told Arriaga that he met his mother in 1991, while they were students at the University of South Alabama. They dated for a while and she got pregnant, initially telling him the baby wasn’t his, Parker recalled. In the summer of 1992, soon after Parker’s father died, he said, Arriaga’s mother visited with a newborn baby — Joseph — and she said the baby was his. They kept in touch, exchanging letters when she moved to Florida.
“I was ecstatic,” he recalled. “I had this feeling of, ‘Wow I’m losing my father, but I gained a child.’ ”
He offered to marry her, Parker said, and although that didn’t happen, they continued to write and visited a few times. In May of 1993, Parker received a note — which he still has — saying she and Joey were moving to California. Then the letters stopped. Of everything Arriaga learned during his first in-person meeting with Parker, it was the old letters Parker still had from Arriaga’s mother that floored him.
Arriaga immediately recognized his mother’s looping handwriting, but the content was impossible to reconcile with the origin story he had been told.
When he was around 8, not long after his cousin let slip he wasn’t really part of the family, Arriaga confronted the man who had married his mother and raised Arriaga from infancy, the man he had believed was his father and refers to as Dad to this day. “You’re not even my real dad,” Arriaga recalls saying.
His mother then pulled him aside, Arriaga said, and told him that he’d been conceived by rape, a concept he didn’t fully understand until a few years later.
But now, Parker was telling him the two had dated and seen each other even after Joey’s birth — and he had letters to confirm that.
From what he read in them, not only had she stayed in touch with Parker, she had sent him pictures of Joey, including a photo he had grown up seeing in a frame at home. She wrote letters about her life, signing them “love,” and described Joey as taking “after his father.” She said she missed Parker and wanted to get together “kind of like a family.”
How did any of this fit together with the conception story his mother had told him?
Arriaga says that when he first mentioned the name Robert Parker in a phone call to his mother, she reacted as if she didn’t recognize the name. He later sent her an email, including pictures of the old letters, saying he knew what it was like to tell a small lie and watch it spiral out of control. He understood, but he needed the full truth and until then, he couldn’t talk to her.
There’s been no movement in that direction so far, and they haven’t been in contact in recent months, Arriaga said, but he loves his mother deeply and hopes to eventually be back in touch with her.
Since September, Arriaga and Parker have emailed back and forth and set up standing Mondaynight phone calls. In December, Arriaga flew to Florida for a short visit. Parker and his two teenage sons picked him up at the airport, and Arriaga remembers doing a double-take when he heard his half-brother Robby’s voice. It sounded just like his own.
When the brothers met in December, they bonded over reading — Robby works at a bookstore — and Halo, a favorite video game. When Arriaga stood in between Robby and their father, the resemblance was uncanny.
“It looks like an evolution chain almost,” Robby said. “He looks like the missing link between us.”
Throughout the trip, Arriaga and Parker picked up on conversations they’d started over email and on the phone. Parker sometimes thought about the violent origin story that Arriaga had grown up believing
— a story that bothers him deeply, Parker said, and infuriates him when he thinks about the psychological toll it took on Arriaga.
Both men agree that the timing of their meeting felt predestined.
For Arriaga, discovering the fuller reality of his origin story offered deep relief.
“It was like a chapter closed,” he said. “I’m not a taboo anymore.”